Sa-Nur Families: Don't Make Soldiers Expel Us

Fears rise that families who returned to their homes will be expelled again; they call on Netanyahu not to 'add sin' of making IDF do it.

Ari Yashar, 28/07/15 19:53

IDF expels Jews (illustration)

Flash 90

There are heavy concerns that the families who returned to Sa-Nur in northern Samaria during the early pre-dawn hours of Tuesday morning will be expelled by security forces in the coming hours on Tuesday night.

The dozens of families, together with 200 supporters from all around Israel, returned to their abandoned homes in the town to mark ten years since it was forcibly evacuated along with three other northern Samaria towns and Gush Katif in Gaza as part of the 2005 Disengagement plan.

On arriving in the evacuated town, the families set to preparing it once again for human habitation, and declared they had returned to stay.

In a letter sent to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon (Likud) on Tuesday morning, the families wrote "this is the time to stop the talking about the injustice (of the Disengagement - ed.) and to move to action."

"We returned to our homes to stay," wrote the families. "We call on you to join the process of return and to approve our return."

The call comes on the heels of a bill currently gaining steam which aims to repeal the Disengagement and return the expelled Jews to their homes.

The families urged Netanyahu and Ya'alon not to have IDF soldiers take part in expelling them from their homes again.

"IDF soldiers are our beloved brothers, flesh of our flesh. We demand not to repeat the trauma of the expulsion, and not to force IDF soldiers to expel us again from our homes."

"Placing the soldiers against their settler brothers is the addition of sin to a crime," they warned. "Even if the government wants to expel Jews from their homes and their land, that should be done by police officers, and not by soldiers and Border Patrol soldiers who give the best of their years for the security of Israel."